About Rebecca Horn

Since the early 1970s, Rebecca Horn has been transforming everything she touches—the body; natural and manmade objects; cultural spaces; and historical sites—into visions of the human condition full of pathos, absurdity, and exquisite beauty. She began her celebrated career while convalescing in a hospital bed, where she concocted her “body-extensions.” Composed of prosthetic bandages and padded protrusions, these wearable sculptures were vehicles through which Horn explored the fraught, funny relationship between the body and the world. Later, she began building kinetic sculptures, stand-ins for the body, whose delicate, awkward motions uncannily reflect human behavior. The consequences of human behavior, especially that of the Nazis, are the focus of Horn’s poetic installations at historical sites worldwide. Both personal and universal, Horn’s work begins from within: “I use my body, I use what happens to me, and I make something.”